Helga Stein, 75, a Jewish
survivor of the Holocaust who remained in Germany
throughout World War II and lived by her wits on the
streets of Berlin in the final chaotic year before the
Nazi surrender, died of cardiopulmonary disease Dec. 11
at her home in Adelphi.

Mrs. Stein immigrated to the United States as a single
mother with two young children in 1950. For the past 11
years, she had lived in this area, where she was known in
the Hillandale community as an unofficial "neighborhood
granny." She spoke about her Holocaust experiences at
Girl Scout meetings and talked to children at such
gathering places as the community swimming pool about
what it was like to be a Jew in the Nazi capital during
the war.

She participated in cinema director Steven Spielberg's
Shoah Foundation project to videotape and preserve
firsthand personal testimony about the Holocaust, and
gave a four-hour interview to Spielberg's
representatives. Videotapes of this interview are at the
Holocaust Museum in Washington and at the Yad Vashem
archives in Israel.

A year to the day before her death, Mrs. Stein
completed a written autobiography, titled "My Story."

She wrote: "I heard so many times from people in
Germany that they had no idea what was going on and never
would have stood silently by while the Jews were thrown
on trucks and shipped to concentration camps. Unless you
were a mole, without eyes and ears, you had to see the
beatings, you had to hear the curse words, you had to
feel the hatred. Too many bystanders joined in these
attacks and thought them very amusing and
entertaining."

Mrs. Stein was born in Berlin in 1927. Her father died
when she was 3. She was 6 when the Nazis took power, and
life for Jews in Germany got bad very quickly. She was
allowed to attend German public schools but was barred
from certain programs. In her final year of secondary
school, she was expelled and forced to work in an
electronics assembly factory. By then, the Holocaust was
proceeding apace.

"The Nazis had painted one bench in all the parks
yellow and designated it 'For Jews Only'" she wrote in
her autobiography. "In the beginning some sat down, but
they soon discovered that it became the favorite sport of
teens and even younger children to abuse them. It could
also happen on some days, when the quota for bringing in
Jews was too low, that they just picked one up right off
the bench. So, needless to say, the benches remained
empty most of the time."

In 1943, Mrs. Stein's mother was seized by the Gestapo
at their home and taken to the Theresienstadt
concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. A friendly neighbor
watched this happen and warned Mrs. Stein -- who had not
been at home -- to stay away.

With a friend, a deserter from the German army named
Gerd Kamnitzer, she went into hiding, living on the
streets and in vacant rooms of bomb-damaged buildings. "I
now had the same routine all the hidden people had. No
shoes, no noise whatsoever during the day when people
were not supposed to be at home. Also no air-raid
shelters for us. But all that changed eventually. With so
many refugees from the Eastern Front and the
ever-increasing bombings over the cities and especially
Berlin, the streets were teeming with people who had no
home. . . . I decided to take my chance on the street,
joining the army of refugees."

The winter of 1945 in Germany was one of the coldest
and snowiest in Mrs. Stein's memory, but she survived.
The last few months of the war were especially perilous.
"Russians were close to Berlin on the Eastern Front. We
became very careful and rarely ever ventured on to the
streets any more. The Nazis had taken teenagers and very
old men and provided them with weapons to shoot at the
Russians." The war in Europe ended May 8. In October,
Mrs. Stein was reunited with her mother, who had survived
Theresienstadt.

Before coming to the United States in 1950, Mrs. Stein
would marry Kamnitzer, have two children with him and
then divorce. She would live for a period in a Displaced
Persons Camp in Germany. Arriving in New York with two
young children, she met Herbert H. Stein, a former
Berliner and another Holocaust survivor, whose parents
and younger brother had all been killed. They married in
1953.

For most of her life in the United States, Mrs. Stein
lived on Long Island, where she was active in the
Organization for Rehabilitation through Training and
president of the Long Island chapter. She was a breeder
and a licensed American Kennel Club judge of German
shepherd dogs.

In the Washington area, she did quilting and made clay
figurine sculptures, and she taught these skills to
neighborhood children.

In addition to her husband, of Adelphi, survivors
include their daughter, Claudia Stein Donnelly of Silver
Spring; two children from her first marriage who were
adopted by Mr. Stein, Lona Stein of New York and Tom
Stein of Potomac; and five grandchildren.